from the leakers,-bloggers-and-journalists dept

Our most insightful comment this week comes in response to the still-too-narrow definition of journalism in the shield law that is moving forward in Congress. Pi racked up lots of votes by quoting the ultimate source:

My words can't do justice, so I'll just go with something I read once.

"Congress shall make no law respecting ... or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press"

The great thing about the Snowden leaks is that you can't simply brush them off as a "mistake" or something that just happened once but will (allegedly) never happen again.

The content is so damning, so thorough and shows so many consistent violations of the most basic rights that it is impossible to ignore.

Look, we both know (or at least suspect) that proprietary software (and sometimes even open-source software...temporarily at least) can be and often is compromised. We also know how to mitigate the damage.

Now go tell a room of computer illiterates that their operating system is compromised and that they have to switch to Linux right now to protect their rights. The end result will probably be that people will basically tell you to fuck off...I should know: I've done that.

These leaks at least made people aware of the issues in a way that is impossible to ignore. So much that it even has political representatives asking questions and pressuring the NSA.

People can still choose to pretend that the problem does not exist, of course. But that's like trying to pretend that the Sun doesn't exist at this point.

It's the same pattern, for months running. When are people (and Congress, and the President, and the Courts, our supposed public servants) going to finally realize that the entire setup is utterly corrupt and untrustworthy? That it needs to be removed in its entirety and maybe replaced (I'm in doubt that we even need the NSA).

The courts need to step in here. Letting congress or the states define who's a journalist and who isn't violates the first amendment.

Here's how. The first amendment guarantees freedom of the press. But how can there be freedom of the press if the government can redefine what the press actually is at any time so that it can go after 'journalists' it doesn't like? If the government can do that, it renders the 1st amendment protections meaningless.

And yes, there HAVE been court rulings on something very similar. Courts have already ruled that the government CANNOT say what is and is not a valid religion, because that would be a way for the government to get around the 1st amendment freedom of religion.

Sure some would argue that wikileaks and the guardian/etc aren't US companies or citizens and therefore shouldn't be covered by the first amendment. But tell me, do you Really think our founding fathers would have been perfectly ok if the government jailed any foreigner it could get it's hands on for criticizing the US government in even the tiniest way, while insisting to US citizens "you have free speech, we aren't arresting any Americans who criticize us"?

Obviously such actions would have a chilling effect on free speech of US citizens to, who would fear that despite what the government says it'll lock them up to for doing the same thing they're arresting foreigners for.

His logic could be applied to just about anything, like scientists developing new technology.

"Sure we've gotten a lot of benefit from scientists inventing new things, but only bad things are going to happen if we let scientists continue to study science. Any new benefits from science will be too marginal because everything good has already been invented. So we need to get rid of all the scientists and their research and development for the good of mankind".

And, last but not least, we head all the way back to last Sunday for a response to one of that week's winning comments. After justok won with the idea of using the Constitution as a public encryption key, Lokitook an opposing viewpoint:

I disagree. Look how many times they've broken the Constitution already.